Demythologizing the Fur Trade

The fur trade has long been a cliché of early Canadian history. It lodges in our minds as a romantic but slightly tedious haze of canoes, beads and blankets, beaver hats, carefree voyageurs, stolid Scots traders, untamed Indians and, of course, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For Canada the fur trade might play the role of the Wild West in American historical mythology, but, with snow and barter instead of dust and bullets, it is a myth that has never been transformed into successful novels or films.

Behind the mythology lies the fact that commerce in the fur of northern animals was a major force in shaping the early European history of the country. It opened Canada to European exploration, in the same way that oil and mineral resources are today fuelling the metastasization of roads and mining camps across the Arctic. It also provided the context for developing relations between Europeans and the indigenous occupants of northern North America. When alien societies come into contact, they are fortunate if each possesses a product that the other needs or considers to be of value. Such was the case in Eastern Canada when 16th-century whalers and fishers encountered First Peoples eager to trade animal skins or cast-off clothing for iron axes, kettles and knives. This balance of interests laid the basis for centuries of economic interdependence. In contrast to most colonial situations—such as that in southeastern North America where Natives had little of value and were simply shoved aside, or in Peru where a surfeit of gold exacted plunder rather than trade—the fur trade created a circumstance that allowed the survival of indigenous culture and the development of a way of life that flourishes today across the snow forests of Northern Canada.

The subtitle of Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade, by Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, should not be understood as applying to the full five centuries of the trade across all of North America. The authors focus on an important but more limited setting, the commerce carried out by the Hudson’s Bay Company from its 18th-century posts along the western shores of the James and Hudson bays. These posts attracted Native traders from a vast territory stretching from the upper Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, southward as far as the tributaries of the Missouri and northward to those of the Mackenzie. Fortunately for scholars of history, most of the transactions of these traders were entered into the accounts and journals of a single commercial enterprise with a penchant for keeping detailed records. The problems of managing a distant business from London headquarters required a formal reporting structure involving not only account books but post journals, annual reports and letters describing the activities of both the post servants and their customers. The resulting archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company comprise what Carlos and Lewis describe as “a window on the structure of aboriginal society and the fur economy at a time when few Europeans had penetrated inland.”

As economic historians, Carlos and Lewis focus their attention on the evidence provided by the account books related to the commerce undertaken at these posts. However, they do not shirk from providing information on the social and biological contexts of the trade. At one end of the subject they present a brief history of the European felting industry and of the popularity of the beaver hat. At the other they discuss the natural history of the North American beaver, devise simulation models of beaver populations in the trade area and analyze the effects of trapping pressure on these populations. Their discussion of indigenous society and culture is brief but competent, and limited to those of the Cree who formed the great majority of the suppliers trading at the posts on the west coast of James Bay. The authors are less thorough in describing the political context of the trade, limiting their interest to the fluctuating intrusion of French trade on the HBC monopoly as a result of various wars, treaties and political manoeuvrings between the governments of Britain and France. Nevertheless, the book provides a novice in the history of the northern fur trade with most of the information required to understand the commercial transactions that are at the core of the authors’ attention.

The major contribution of the book lies in the statistical analysis of these transactions, and it is a contribution that provides valuable insights on two distinct levels. Most directly, it contributes to an understanding of the trade itself, clarifying and correcting long-ingrained impressions based on less thorough analyses of the northern fur trade. For example, the study demonstrates that this was no “beads in exchange for Manhattan” exercise in fleecing ignorant yokels. In 1742 Native trappers received 15 to 20 percent of the amount for which beaver skins were sold in London, which the authors consider a fair price in view of the costs of maintaining HBC establishments in Canada and England and transporting goods between them. They demonstrate the power held by Native traders in selecting goods for exchange and the resulting care that the company was forced to take in providing merchandise of good quality. They note the increased prices paid to those trappers who could play off the HBC traders against French competitors. In this connection, they note that Cree was the language of the commerce, and that the HBC early on began to recruit young English boys whose ability to become fluent in Cree was basic to their usefulness as traders and other workers at the company’s posts.

Their analysis also clearly demonstrates the rational choices made by trappers in selecting the goods exchanged for their furs. During the early 18th century more than 60 percent of the items sold by the HBC were “producer goods” directly related to making a living: guns and ammunition, axes, ice chisels, twine and fish hooks. About 10 percent were “household goods”: kettles, blankets, awls and needles. Another 15 percent were cloth, beads, lace, vermillion and other “household luxuries.” Finally, about 10 percent was spent on tobacco and 5 percent on alcohol. Although the proportion of luxury goods purchased increased throughout the following decades, neither alcohol nor tobacco exceeded 20 percent of the total trade, and, according to post journals, drunken post employees seem to have posed a far more serious problem than drunken trappers.

The authors’ statistics also confront a persistent stereotype of fur trade scholarship, that of “the lazy Indian”—or in social economic terms, the Native as satisficer who was content to trap only enough beaver to exchange for his basic technological needs, and who could not be tempted to work harder by paying higher prices. They note that much of the evidence for the notion that, in the words of fur trade historian E.E. Rich, “English economic rules did not apply to the Indian trade” derives from testimony at a 1749 parliamentary committee inquiring into the terms of the HBC monopoly. The authors observe that the argument that more competition and higher prices would not stimulate greater productivity would seem to have favoured the retention of monopoly conditions, and they note similar arguments made at the time with regard to European peasants and manufacturing labour. The argument is also curiously reminiscent of current discussions regarding the utility of raising the minimum wage. In contrast to that theory, the statistics presented in this study demonstrate that trapping effort did respond to increased competition and higher prices, to the extent that by the mid 18th century beaver were being trapped at a rate that was well above the maximum sustainable yield. The authors suggest that the old stereotype be replaced by one of “the industrious Indian,” a being whose economic interests overruled even those of “the ecological Indian,” a phrase invented by anthropologist Shepard Krech to denote the view of Native North Americans as natural conservationists.

Carlos and Lewis’s simulations of 18th-century beaver populations and of the deleterious effects of commercial trapping provide evidence that suggests the questioning of this more positive stereotype as well. The models and simulations appear realistic to this reviewer, who has no expertise in the field of wild- life biology, but if they were to be questioned there is no doubt that by the 19th century overtrapping had devastated beaver populations over large parts of their range. The attempt to square this fact with the ecological Indian concept has provided decades of scholarly debate. The most ingenious and elegantly stated product of this discussion was that of historian Calvin Martin, whose 1978 book Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships in the Fur Trade argued that the beaver were not slaughtered for commercial gain, but in a war of self-defence against animals that were ascribed spiritual responsibility for the epidemic diseases afflicting Native societies engaged in the fur trade. The thesis, attractive as it might be to believers in an aboriginal conservation ethic, has been effectively demolished by other scholars of the fur trade. The authors approach the problem through a reprise of anthropological discussions of the Cree system of family or band-owned hunting territories, and note that the ability to manage the animal resources of family territories was subject to prevailing rules of hospitality and generosity.

Carlos and Lewis contribute to the destruction of more significant stereotypes through their enlightening comparisons of the economic lives of 18th-century Cree trappers with those of their contemporaries in England and other European countries. At one level, these comparisons are sometimes strained and even absurd. It is clear that the all-meat diet of the Cree was more nutritious than the diet of the English working class and was closer to that aspired to by the upper classes; indeed, the difference was reflected in the superior stature of the Cree. But calculations of the cost of Cree skin clothing designed for subarctic winters (£2.6 per family per year) compared to that paid by the English working classes (£1.2) tells us little. Similarly, comparisons of the cost of shelter—Cree tents and seasonal wooden structures against the permanent houses and tenements of the European working classes—might be more reasonable if one could factor in the social and health costs of isolation in the bush measured against the crowding and poor sanitation of 18th-century European towns.

At another level, however, these comparisons provide an insight into aboriginal life that is generally lacking in anthropological or historical studies. They show not only that the Cree were roughly equal to the English working classes with regard to material goods, but also that the Cree were participating in much the same way in “the eighteenth century consumer revolution.” Although Cree consumption of alcohol and tobacco was much lower than that of their English contemporaries, their increasing use of these commodities mirrored the 18th-century English espousal of non-European groceries such as tobacco, tea, sugar and rum. The non-consumable luxuries purchased by the Cree—beads, rings, buttons, lace, trunks and mirrors—were the same items that appear in probate lists of English and British North American households of the time. Like the industrious workers of Europe, the Cree were acquiring new aesthetic preferences and were satisfying these needs by devoting greater amounts of effort to participating in the emerging global economy.

This view of North American aboriginals as people who lived in the same world as Europeans, although at different points along an urban-to-rural continuum, is a perspective that is missing from most scholarly treatments of the fur trade. Much of aboriginal history is written by anthropologists, or by historians with anthropological training, and tends to treat indigenous societies as so distinctive that comparison with western society is either impossible or at least unproductive. Depriving their subject of a world context, they reinforce the impression that aboriginal peoples live in a static reality that is separate from that of the dynamically changing world of globally oriented cultures.

This distortion can be blamed in good part on the training and reward structure of traditional anthropology, and to an even greater extent on that of the recently emerging discipline of Native studies. Two decades ago anthropologist Roger Keesing wrote an insightful but widely ignored article titled “Exotic Readings of Cultural Texts.” Keesing argued that, like geographical explorers and travel writers, anthropologists are rewarded primarily through the discovery of new and exotic phenomena. He tells of a colleague who was invited to prepare a paper in honour of anthropological guru Claude Lévi-Strauss, and who eagerly set to work analyzing the concept of “direction” as it was perceived by the indigenous people whom he had studied. But when he eventually realized that their concepts of orientation and the naming of directions was no different from his own, he simply did not bother completing a paper that would attract no attention and likely not get published. The culmination of many such decisions must create a significant bias in the perspective of the anthropological discipline, and more importantly in the perspective through which aboriginal people are viewed by the public and by the governments under which they live.

The work of Carlos and Lewis is effective in correcting this false impression. By demonstrating that the 18th-century aboriginal people of Northern Canada shared much in common with their European contemporaries, they succeed in portraying the northern fur trade in a new and very useful light.